


Last Resorts

by The_Bookkeeper



Series: Hi Qui Custodiunt Ipsum Custodem [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Moral Ambiguity, Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 02:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/657282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Bookkeeper/pseuds/The_Bookkeeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack and the Doctor discuss weapons, and things get heated. Unfortunately, that is not nearly as euphemistic as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Resorts

**Author's Note:**

> To anyone who's following the series, this takes place sometime between 'In From the Cold' and 'There's a Pair of Us.' To anyone who isn't, all you need to know is that Jack found the Doctor post-Runaway Bride and pre-Smith and Jones, and is now travelling with him. Absolute time, as you can probably gather, this is set sometime around Smith and Jones.

Jack sat on the grating in the console room, elbow-deep in the Doctor’s coat pocket. He had volunteered to help the Doctor with his more-or-less constant repairs, but it turned out that the particular problem the Time Lord was in the middle of sorting was one of the few things that Jack was actually incapable of assisting him with. After their last, rather traumatic escapade in Royal Hope Hospital (and the Doctor’s latest attempt at fulfilling his death wish), he was unwilling to let his friend out of his sight for too long.  
  
Still, listening to the Doctor mutter to himself and curse in alien languages was only entertaining for so long, so Jack had settled down with the intent of going through the Doctor’s dimensionally transcendental pockets. So far, he had discovered, among other things: three wind-up toys, a box of everlasting matches, a vacuum-sealed protein bar (which he ate), a handful of loose candies (which he didn’t), several unlabeled bottles and unidentifiable bits of machinery, and a banana.  
  
“Doctor?”  
  
“Mm?” came the absent reply from somewhere beneath the grating.  
  
“Do you always carry a banana?”  
  
“Hm? Oh. Yes. Surprisingly useful. Never know when you might need one.”  
  
“How often do you switch them out?” asked Jack, frowning at the perfectly ripe fruit.  
  
“I don’t. Time Lord trick.” His voice was distracted, his mind obviously not on the conversation. “It’s trapped in a moment.”  
  
Jack blinked in the vague direction of the Doctor’s voice, then eyed the fruit again.   
  
“. . . . right.” He was silent for a few minutes, fishing around in the depths of the coat. He extracted five rings of various designs (a couple of which looked suspiciously marital), and eleven small articles of clothing before he spoke again. “Is this my sock?”  
  
“Ah . . .” The Doctor climbed up to floor level, his hair standing on end and his suit rumpled, and eyed the indicated footwear. “Possibly.”  
  
“Should have known you were the fetish type. Hey, if that’s your kink —”  
  
“I can’t be responsible for where your things end up, Jack,” said the Doctor, turning away and slipping on his glasses as he adjusted the monitor.   
  
“If they’re in your pockets, I’m pretty sure you can,” Jack retorted, with more amusement than irritation. “Seriously, when was the last time you cleaned out this thing?”  
  
“Well, you never know what will come in handy.”   
  
“Sure,” said Jack, taking that to mean ‘never.’ “But, y’know, I really can’t imagine a situation where the fate of the Universe would depend on half a manicure kit and a stale Jammy Dodger.”   
  
The Doctor scowled at him. “ _I_  can think of at least a dozen,” he said huffily. “Besides, it’s not as if the state of my pockets is a top priority of mine. What about you?” He bounded across the room and snatched up Jack’s greatcoat from where it was draped across one of the struts. “What’s in Captain Jack Harkness’ pockets?”   
  
“Doctor —” Jack began, springing up, because he knew what the Doctor would find, and it wouldn’t do anything good or useful for either of them, not when they had only just mended the hurt between them.  
  
“No, no,” the Doctor scolded, dodging out of reach with an agility that belied his gangly appearance. “Turnabout is fair play, Captain!” he sang cheerfully, digging into the pockets of Jack’s coat. “Now what do we have here . . .”   
  
Jack watched tensely, and he knew the exact moment when the Doctor found it. It only took a few seconds, because he was the Doctor, and  _of course_ his clever fingers would slip past the money and condoms and keys and land on the one thing that he wasn’t supposed to know about. The Doctor froze. A myriad of emotions flickered over his face before it went blank. He slowly withdrew his hand from the pocket, and held up a small, vaguely gun-shaped object.   
  
“Jack,” he said, with deadly calm. “Why is this in your pocket?”  
  
“Look, Doc, I can explain,” said Jack, holding up his hands in surrender (or maybe defense).   
  
“Oh, please do.”  
  
Jack’s stomach turned at the steel in the Doctor’s eyes, the silky smoothness in his voice. It was the kind of voice he used when he was holding himself in complete control, because he didn’t trust himself not to do something he’d regret. It was the kind of voice he used when he was beyond furious.  
  
It was the kind of voice he used with enemies.  
  
“I confiscated it from a Stoian bounty hunter a few months ago. I stuck in my pocket, but then his friend started shooting and I was distracted. Never got around to dealing with it.”  
  
The Doctor eyed him with that look of his that made Jack wonder just how telepathic he was.  
  
“No,” he said at last. “You would never be that careless with a weapon. Try again.”  
  
“Worth a shot,” Jack said, with a half-hearted imitation of his usual grin. The Doctor didn’t smile back, and Jack sighed. “I  _did_  confiscate it from a bounty hunter. I kept it in my pocket to keep it out of reach of my team. They’re good people, but they don’t always get the significance of stuff like this.”  
  
“But you do,” said the Doctor, and it wasn’t a question. “You know exactly what this is, so why didn’t you destroy it the first chance you got?”   
  
“Because it’s useful.”  
  
“ _Useful?!_ ” growled the Doctor, his pseudo-calm evaporating in an instant. “This is a cellular degenerator! It’s illegal in every sector! It’s the reason I destroyed the weapons factories in Villengard!”   
  
“And it’s saved my ass more than once!” snapped Jack, refusing to be quailed by the burning in the Doctor’s eyes. “You know as well as I do that not everyone can be talked down, but they’re a hell of a lot more likely to go quietly if the other option is a slow death instead of a quick bullet to the head.”  
  
“That doesn’t excuse it,” said the Doctor coldly, and Jack wanted to shake him. He could never understand how a man who made all Jack’s lines waver and fade and reform into a million shades of grey could see some things in such black-and-white terms.   
  
“Oh, don’t get all self-righteous,” he snarled in frustration. “It’s not as if you’re a pacifist.”  
  
“I don’t carry a gun.”  
  
“You don’t have to! You just whip out your goddamn screwdriver and dismantle a toaster and the next thing you know a whole factory complex is fucking incinerated!”  
  
“A factory complex, not a person!”  
  
“You have  _got_  to be kidding me,” said Jack scornfully. “You think I haven’t read the Canary Warf files? How many Cybermen and Daleks did you suck into the Void? Millions? Billions?”  
  
“Those weren’t people,” said the Doctor, and his voice was cold and dangerous, his eyes dark and ancient. A hundred years ago, Jack might have backed down at that, but not now.  
  
“No?” he asked sharply, ignoring the irrational trickle of fear that ran down his back, the wild thought that if anyone could figure out a way to kill him, it would be the Doctor. “What about the others? What about that werewolf with Queen Victoria? What about those bat aliens at Deffry Vale? What about the Plasmavore yesterday? You might not have killed her, but you sure as hell engineered her death.”  
  
“Would you rather I hadn’t?” asked the Doctor angrily. “Would you rather I’d let her kill half the planet, or the Krillitanes destroy the Universe, or the werewolf take over the Earth?”  
  
“Of course not! All I’m saying is that you can’t get pissed at me for doing the same thing!”   
  
“ _It’s not the same thing!_ ” insisted the Doctor, and there was something like desperation in his voice and his eyes and his white-knuckled grip on the degenerator. “I don’t go in there planning to kill them! It’s always a last resort!”  
  
“You think it isn’t for me?!” Jack shouted right back. “You think I  _like_  killing people?”  
  
“No! But this is  _cruel_ , Jack.” The Doctor gestured with the degenerator, drawing Jack’s attention back to the original point of conflict. “This is _designed_  to cause the most painful death possible!”  
  
“More painful than burning to death?”  
  
The Doctor flinched as though struck, all color draining from his face as the degenerator clattered to the floor from his suddenly limp fingers. Too late, Jack realized the double meaning in his words.  
  
“That was — I couldn’t —” the Doctor babbled frantically, shaking his head in denial and backing away, the powerful alien being of moments ago replaced by the broken, vulnerable man who always shivered behind the Doctor’s shields.   
  
“Doctor, I’m sorry; that’s not what I meant,” said Jack, his anger softening as the Doctor came to halt against one of the coral struts. He looked impossibly fragile as he trembled, pale from the blood loss on the moon, still unhealthily skinny and obviously exhausted despite all of Jack’s efforts to make him eat and sleep properly. “I was just talking about Villengard, I swear.”   
  
“There was no other way,” the Doctor said, voice cracking, and Jack wasn’t sure which event he was talking about or who he was trying to convince.   
  
“I know, Doc,” Jack sighed, pulling his friend into an embrace. He held him silently, waiting for his ragged breathing to even out. When the Doctor finally calmed, he spoke again, his tone somewhere between teasing and annoyed. “You’re impossible to fight with, you know that?”  
  
The Doctor chuckled against his neck, weak and shaky but genuine.   
  
“You were having a pretty good go at it just now.”  
  
“Yeah,” Jack snorted, “for about two minutes. Then you blink those big brown eyes at me and I melt into a mushy pile of sentimentalism.”   
  
It was the Doctor’s turn to snort as he pulled away, composure regained and mask of ‘always alright’ back in place.   
  
“We still have to deal with that,” he said, gesturing at the degenerator where it had fallen on the grating. “I won’t have it in the TARDIS.”  
  
“I know. I’ve actually been meaning to get rid of it, but I haven’t gotten the chance.”  
  
“Right,” said the Doctor flatly. He pulled out his sonic and aimed it at the weapon, sending up a shower of sparks. “Now you’re rid of it.” He stepped around Jack and moved back to the console without looking at him.  
  
Jack watched as he fiddled with a couple controls. It was obvious from the set of his shoulders that he was still angry, but also obvious that he wasn’t going to bring it up again anytime soon. The silence grew steadily more awkward, until Jack had to break it.  
  
“I never used it, you know.”   
  
“Never used what?” asked the Doctor, with a fairly good impression of inattention. Jack rolled his eyes at his evasion, but continued.   
  
“The degenerator. I only ever threatened with it. Never even took the safety off.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“What?” asked Jack, taken aback.   
  
“I know,” the Doctor repeated, not looking up. “The battery panel is rusted; it hasn’t been replaced in years. It would have been in better shape if you had used it.”  
  
“You knew that this whole time?”   
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Then why —?”  
  
“Just because it hasn’t been used doesn’t mean it couldn’t be,” the Doctor snapped over his shoulder. A moment later he deflated, sighing tiredly and running a hand over his face. He turned to face Jack, eyes meeting his and stopping any protest before it could start. “There’s always that temptation. You tell yourself you won’t, but then you’re looking at someone who’s done such terrible things — hurt so many people. And you think, ‘it would be so, so easy’ — just the flick of thumb and the twitch of a finger. All it takes is a moment. One moment when vengeance is more important than morals, when vengeance  _seems_  moral, and then you can never go back.”  
  
Jack looked into eyes that were dark and ancient and pained, and got the feeling that they weren’t talking about the degenerator anymore. He wondered just what kinds of guns had been wielded by a race that could bend time to their will just to keep their fruit fresh. A shiver ran up his spine.  
  
“I understand,” he said.   
  
The Doctor nodded.  
  
“Good.” He began to turn back to the console.  
  
“But I’m keeping the revolver,” Jack added. The Doctor stopped and raised an eyebrow at him, questioning but no longer confrontational. “If you get the sonic, I get at least one gun.”  
  
“Fair enough,” agreed the Doctor. “But  _only_  as a last resort!” he clarified sharply, pointing at Jack.  
  
Jack’s mind flickered to the image of the plasmavore incinerated by Judoon, caught in a trap that had nearly cost the Doctor his life; to the Cybermen and Daleks — millions of them, billions — sucked into Hell, condemned by a plan that had cost the Doctor the one thing that was holding him together. But . . . there had been other days. Days that didn’t leave destruction behind them and tear the Doctor to pieces. Days when everybody lived. Jack couldn’t help remembering a Slitheen assassin who had gotten her wish for a second chance, and a cocksure ex-Time Agent conman, still young enough to think his cynicism was wisdom, who had gotten his own version of rebirth.  
  
“Yeah,” he said at last, placing a firm hand on the Doctor’s too-thin shoulder and trying to let his eyes communicate everything the Time Lord couldn’t handle him saying aloud. “A last resort. Always.”


End file.
